8 responses to “Poll: What did you think of 6×09 Ab Aeterno?”

Okay, maybe I’m stupid for just watching and enjoying the show as it comes on. Maybe I have better things to do with my time than spend it online learning all I can about the show and each new episode before it airs. Maybe I’m a dinosaur because I only have a VCR and not a DVR.

Assuming all of these are true, does that mean I’m not entitled to be warned that upcoming episodes will run SIX FRIGGING MINUTES LONG??? I had my VCR programmed to record from 7:58 to 9:02, Central Time. So I missed the last four minutes of the episode. Will I get those four minutes back on next week’s rebroadcast?

I loved Ab Aeterno. It tells one whole story in a single episode. The story is pivotal and reveals many things.

One sequence of events is the landing of the Black Rock. The captain of the ship descends bellow the deck to that galley where the prisoners are chained. He is weeping and has malice on his mind.

Compare this to the landing of flight 815. Observe Jack healing the wounded. How striking is the diferrence? Why the different approach?

Why did Jack act so different than the captain of the Black Rock? Was it just a matter of whimsy? Different people act differently in different situations and it could have been different depending on how they woke in the morning?

Or was there an underlying cause? Why did the captain of the Black Rock kill his prisoners? Why did Jack attempt to save all the passengers?

Why was Jack acting differently than the captain? They were just different people. Jack was driven by his need to “fix” people — that was a core aspect of his personality.

The captain (actually, I just looked at the script to refresh my memory of this scene, which I had forgotten — and it was the slave-trader Jonas, not the captain, who was killing the slaves, as the captain had died in the storm) — Jonas simply did not have Jack’s compulsion to heal, and he was trying to kill the slaves in what he thought was self-defense, fearing they would turn on him and kill him if they survived.

What would I have done? I probably wouldn’t have been like either Jack or Jonas. I certainly wouldn’t have gone around killing people, but I don’t think I would have automatically put myself in charge of saving them all, either. I probably would have helped where I could, but in a less self-aggrandizing way than Jack. I’d have been more like Hurley.

Well you could look only at their compulsion. You could say that they are just two different people and different people act differently.

Or you consider their minds. As we see in LOST, people actions are consequences of what they know about the world they live in. In LOST this means what they have discovered about the island.

But for new arrivals it means the world they came from. We come from Jack’s time and mindset so I will describe Jonas and Ricardo’s perspective. Jonas came from a time that had a predominate world-view. For thousands of years the Western world was organized under a system known as the “divine right of kings”. This system of thought started with the premise that the world we live in was derived from a world of perfect forms. Every object, including people, is an imperfect ‘image’ of one of these perfect forms, so man was created in God’s image and tables were created in the image of ‘table’, the concept of table. (This is derived from Plato and why I think the man in black was Plato, maybe.) Knowledge of these perfect forms could only be derived by divine inspiration, and the person most inspired was the Pope. So all knowledge came from on high and was handed down through a hierarchy to the masses of people at the bottom, who would be helpless without their king.

People literally believed that, without a king to rule them, every person would murder every other person. They believed that the Ten Commandments were the only reasons we had for not lying to and murdering each other, while sleeping with each others wives and lazily eating all the food. Many people still believe this but back then it was taught in every school and was the foundation on which nations were formed.

While Jonas could see that the men in the galley were men, his belief system told him they were worthless cattle. A blacksmith is a blacksmith, and if you have no need of a blacksmith he is just a mouth to feed, a liability. What is worse, away on this lost island, with no flag, there is no law, no ten commandments. With no enforcer of God’s law men will do what they have always longed to do (they suppose) and murder everyone. The only defense against murder didn’t exist there, so it would happen. You didn’t need any other reason to kill someone. Much of the world still exists in this state.

But about 200 years before Jonas there was a man who noticed something that no one else noticed. In godless, king-less pirate colonies there were still a few people alive. In fact they were flourishing! How could this be? Without the divine right of kings these pirates had found some other reason not to kill each other!

He read these reports about the pirate colonies and surmised that they had discovered some man-made law, some fundamental moral code, derived only from the facts of existence, which kept pirates from killing each other.

He went on to study it more and to right two treatises on what he found. His writings would move slowly across the world and lead to the founding of the first nation not based on the divine right of kings, and to the formation of individual rights.

Hi. Sorry it took me so long to answer this. Are you still there? Slow is good. 😉

Interesting point about the different world views in Jonas/Ricardo’s time and ours.

I suspect, though, that the writers weren’t digging that deep. Almost every work of fiction has flat and round characters. Jack was a round character — he was complex, and had contradictory impulses, and he grew and changed throughout the series. Jonas, though, was a flat character. He was, in my opinion, a two-dimensional bad guy, and his main function in the story was not to be inherently interesting, but to move the plot forward.

Also, he was a slave trader, and I would assume that slave traders of any era — including our own — would be callous and cruel. Seems like a necessary prerequisite for the job.

Interesting observation about John Locke. Do you think the characters’ names had special significance, or do you think the writers were just using philosophers’ names chosen at random? I’m leaning more towards the second.